


Paris Below

by astrid_fischer



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Crossover, Door Cosette, Gen, Marquise Eponine, Multi, Neverwhere AU, Richard Marius
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-14
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2017-12-11 19:56:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/802606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrid_fischer/pseuds/astrid_fischer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Les Mis/Neverwhere AU wherein the Marquise de Carabas encounters a drunk in an alley, Marius Pontmercy finds himself well out of his depth, Princess Euphrasie is running from an assassin with a wolf's smile, everyone knows to stay away from the Gare de Montparnasse, and there's a Metro car of revolutionaries in the Bastille.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PARIS BELOW

The man in the alley was laughing to himself.

He was sat with his back up against the cold, slimy brick behind him, his breathing shallow and painful because it felt like one or two ribs were broken. He was accustomed enough to the feeling to know what it meant.

Blood was drying in a tight mask over his nose and lips, and one eye had already started to swell shut. He was sitting amidst several overflowing bags of trash and stacked cardboard boxes. His vision swam before his eyes and the chill of Parisian winter seeped in through his threadbare canvas jacket, but still, he was laughing.

Alcohol may still have been flowing amply through his bloodstream and he may have been just this side of unconscious, but he still knew irony when it cornered him in a back alley and kicked the shit out of him.

He’d come Above because he wanted to be invisible, just for a few hours, and Below had found him even here.

The white cat sitting at the mouth of the alley rolled its eyes at him, finished cleaning one pristine paw, and then sauntered away down the corner.

Grantaire—because that was the man’s name, Grantaire—waved goodbye to the cat with what felt like a large amount of effort before slumping back against the wall, coughing.

Distantly, he patted at his pocket to see if his wallet was still there. He didn’t think it was. That meant he was out of luck for this month’s market, unless Courfeyrac was feeling particularly charitable.

“You look like hell,” a girl’s voice came from above him, and Grantaire eased his eyes open again.

The first things he saw (because raising his gaze up from the ground turned out to be an exceptionally painful process) were battered black boots with studded steel toes, laced up over the knee. Live white daisies were threaded through the holes where the laces ought to be.

As he tilted his head back, the strange boots gave way to ripped stockings, which gave way to a silver-and-gold sequined dress mostly hidden by an oversized green velvet frock coat with too-long, singed sleeves and a turned up collar. Which gave way to an exceptionally pale face with sharp dark eyes regarding him in dark amusement.

“You look like the bargain bin at Topshop,” he replied thickly, and turned his head to spit out blood.

The Marquise de Carabas smiled down at him, a red lipsticked cat’s smile, and tapped a finger to the brim of her bowler hat in greeting.

The white cat had draped itself over her shoulders and was eying Grantaire with a distinctly superior air.

“Took you long enough,” Grantaire said next, every bit as if he’d been expecting her. The last word disappeared into a painful-sounding cough, which became a fit of coughing, and it was a moment before he was able to ask raggedly, “How many favors is that now?”

“This one’s on me,” the Marquise told him, extending a hand. He took it, and she pulled him to his feet with seemingly little effort for someone who looked like she weighed ninety-eight pounds soaking wet.

“How charitably unlike you,” he commented with a sardonic smile in her general direction, bracing himself against the wall because standing up had made his vision go black for a moment. At first he thought he might just slide right back to the ground, but the dangerous seconds passed and he managed to keep his feet.

“What can I say? Feeling generous today. So, tell me,” she said, stepping back with her hands in her pockets as she looked around to check they were alone. “What brings you to Paris Above?”

He sighed and let his head tip back to rest against the brick. “I could ask you the same question.”

“I have a princess to find. One I was in the middle of finding, actually, when someone told me a drunken debtor of mine could use some help.” She scratched the cat affectionately between the ears and it yawned before hopping down from her shoulders to pad away out of the alley.

The girl didn’t seem too concerned as to its whereabouts as she fixed Grantaire with a stare. “Your turn.”

When he only shivered and made a low groaning sound without responding, something flickered across her face which might almost have been concern. She gave him a once-over, as if realizing for the first time the visible extent of his injuries, then sighed, shrugged off her jacket, and held it out to him. At his surprised look, she shook the jacket impatiently. He took it from her with cold-stiff fingers.

“Come on, Grantaire,” she said, and he winced. He hated when she didn’t call him by a nickname—it meant she was serious, and they both hated when she was serious.

When he was done pulling the jacket on (very slowly, because of the piercing pain in his ribs) she stepped closer and helped support his weight as they started out of the alley. “What idiotic thing did you do this time?” she pressed.

“Would you believe, for once I was actually just in the wrong place at the wrong time?” he mumbled as they emerged onto the Rue de Rivoli and side-stepped a loudly-talking group of girls with brightly colored shopping bags hanging off their arms.

“Knowing you? Probably not.”

“Thugs from Below. Followed me and cornered me in the alley. I guess stumbling out of a bar at noon makes you an easy target. Who knew, right?”

Eponine snorted under her breath.

“Coming to look for me specially, letting favors slide, giving me the jacket off your back…” Grantaire grinned crookedly and looked up through his lashes at the girl. “If you’re not careful, Ep, I’m going to think you might actually like me.”

Her response (which he should have anticipated, really) was to let go of him with no warning, so that, robbed of her support, he staggered sideways and had to cling to a parking meter or else fall out into traffic.

None of the passers-by so much as glanced at either of them, even the man standing a hair’s breadth away from Grantaire in front of the meter, digging through his pockets for change.

Grantaire was very obviously very drunk, not to mention covered in blood, and Eponine looked like a secondhand shop had exploded all over her, but none of the Parisian citizens so much as batted an eye.

“Rude,” he said, and dissolved into coughing again. The Marquise de Carabas rolled her eyes at him and shrugged his arm over her shoulders again. “Your importance to me depends only on one thing,” she told him. Her voice became a dangerous sort of purr as she added, “which I trust you managed not to lose?”

“By ‘lose’, do you mean ‘get stolen from me while I was being mugged’?”

She arched one eyebrow. “Can I take that as your assurance that you still have it?”

He sighed. “You can.”

He squinted at her as they descended the steps down into the Metro. The white cat had appeared again, and was leading the way, weaving in between ankles and calling no more notice to itself than the two humans were. “Am I very drunk, or did you say something about a princess earlier?”

“You are very drunk,” she told him, leading him to the edge of the nearest platform. Once again, no one paid them any mind. “And I did. But keep your voice down, will you?”

“Please,” Grantaire giggled, allowing her to wrestle him down onto the tracks. “I could slap one of these lovely people in the face and they wouldn’t—ow.”

“You’re embarrassing yourself,” she told him kindly, grinning down at him from her crouch on the platform. She hopped down herself, boots crunching on the gravel beneath the corroded metal of the tracks. She paid no mind at all to the waiting Metro car boarding in the tunnel directly behind them.

A loud, panicked voice from the platform yelled, “Hey!”

Of course, they both ignored it, because who in Paris Above would be talking to them? No one in the upper city remembered them, or could even see them.

It wasn’t until the man yelled, “Get off the tracks! What are you doing?” that they paid a little bit of attention.

“Is he talking to us?” Grantaire frowned, attempting to focus on the person now waving his arms frantically in their direction.

“You! In the green jacket! You’re going to get yourselves killed!”

“Definitely not us,” Eponine said. She let Grantaire slump against the side of the tunnel while she moved to twist the rusted handle of a door built into the wall.

“Oh my—someone, help!” the man, freckly and with disheveled brown hair, wearing a reasonably nice suit and a panicked expression, looked around wildly. Those nearest him were inching away, mothers muttering to their children to stop staring and businessmen pretending to be on the phone.

“You know, I think he is talking to us,” Grantaire said, frowning. He had used up all of his remaining energy on the walk here and was now sitting on the train tracks, head lolling back and legs stretched out. A throbbing headache had settled in.

Eponine jimmied the latch and managed to wrench the door open. As soon as there was the slightest gap through which to fit, the white cat leapt forward and disappeared into the shadowy corridor beyond. “Self-serving bastard,” she called after it, and thought she saw its tail twitch in appreciation before it vanished into the gloom.

Eponine moved back the few steps to where Grantaire had collapsed and hauled him back to his feet by the lapels of the green coat. “Jesus Christ, you smell like a distillery,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.

“You could just leave me, you know,” he pointed out as she prodded him ruthlessly towards the doorway.

“You’re wearing my jacket,” she replied. “I like that jacket.”

“Hey,” someone called desperately, “Please, you have to get back up here,” and Eponine turned back from pushing Grantaire through the door to see the man clambering down onto the tracks.

Her eyes widened, because the noise was blaring through the station to announce that the five-car train was departing from Châtelet, and this idiot was going to be painted across a Metro tunnel on the ten o’clock news.

She wouldn’t pretend there wasn’t a moment where she didn’t consider it. Just leaving him, that is, because he sure as hell wasn’t her problem and she already had three or four or five Situations on her plate this afternoon.

But she wasn’t heartless, and so even as the man turned around in horror to stare at the Metro car as it began to pull out, the Marquise bit out a curse, reached out to snag the back of his collar, and dragged him backwards into the safety of the dark tunnel as the train thundered past.


	2. A Wolf, a Rat, and a Cat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Paris below what?” Marius asked, interrupting her musings.
> 
> “Below everything,” Grantaire answered. His smile was crooked. “Do you ever wonder what happens to the poor? The scum of the streets? The forgotten kids? The people with nowhere else to go?”
> 
> Marius mumbled something that sounded like “Shelters?” and Grantaire laughed, his bitterest laugh.
> 
> “Hardly. No, there’s no one in all of that posh city of yours who would make that sort of effort. We fall through the cracks,” the drunk mimed sand trickling through his fingers, “and end up here. Of course, the Marquise here was born Below.”

She was running, but she could still hear it over the slap of her own footfalls, over the frantic beating of her heart and her own shallow breathing.

The sound of metal scraping over stone. The point of a knife as it dragged along a cold brick wall behind her, and the low, dark chuckle which accompanied it as the passage ran out and the girl was faced with a solid expanse of brick right in front of her.

She whirled around in the narrow space, staring back into the blind darkness behind her.

The following footsteps weren’t hurried. Her pursuer wasn’t running, and that was somehow much, much more terrifying—because he didn’t need to run to catch her, and they both knew it.

Cosette turned back and ran frantic hands over the wall, brick biting into her fingers and catching at her fingernails. Panic crawled its way up her throat. There was nothing; no escape in either direction, and no way out of the dead-end passageway—except, of course, for back the way she’d just come.

The man following her was whistling now, a jaunty sound which made a chill shudder down her spine. It was the same tune she’d heard from her mother’s room only a half an hour earlier, right before the man had emerged with red dripping from his hands and a smile that widened to show very white, pointed teeth.

“Little girl,” he called after her now, in a voice like silk rasping over velvet, and the words bounced off the brick walls in the dark. “I have a bedtime story for you. It’s about wolves. Wouldn’t you like to hear it?

Cosette scarcely dared breathe, even as her heart thudded an uneven rhythm in her chest. _Think of somewhere. Think of anywhere_.

But she couldn’t think of anything except the shivering sound of metal on brick, the steady pace of his footfalls, the coal-black glitter of those eyes. She was cold all over with fear, and her sister’s blood was heavy on her skirt and the memory of those eyes was going to swallow her whole.

“Mustn’t waste time with stories,” the same voice chided itself, making a faint _tsk_ ing sound of admonishment. The footsteps drew closer. “Showing is better than telling.”

_Think of somewhere_.

Cosette wasn’t even sure how the bit of rock had got into her hand—had she grabbed it while running, hoping to use it as a weapon? She certainly hadn’t done so consciously—but now she jammed it to the wall and dragged three quick, messy lines into the brick.

There was no other way out of this passageway—her pursuer had known that, of course, when he’d driven her into it. He knew the labyrinth of passages beneath Paris better than most, and he wasn’t injured and half-mad with fear.

There was no other way out, but one had just appeared at the end of the passage as he rounded the corner—a doorway bordered by light, light enough to illuminate the wide-eyed face of the waif he was chasing. Their eyes locked for just a moment, a moment where her heart stopped, and then she stumbled backward through the doorway.

The light vanished, and when the man’s eyes adjusted to the dark again—it didn’t take long, after all, for he was a creature accustomed to shadows—the girl had gone with it. The outline of the door had vanished.

This, he considered, twirling the glittering knife over and over in one hand, was something of a problem.

*****

“I don’t understand,” the man—who had offered his name as Marius Pontmercy, though neither of the inexplicable people now walking ahead of him had bothered to give their names in return—said again.

He said it with an air of desperation, and it was hard to blame him: he didn’t understand because the other man was too staggering-drunk to explain anything about the present situation (he didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about it, although maybe that was just the alcohol) and the woman in the costume dress and strange boots had only shushed him severely every time he’d tried to ask anything.

The thing was, he didn’t _actually_ think it was that unreasonable to ask what was going on, when everyone on the station platform had acted as if they didn’t see the two crazy people climbing down onto the tracks, and then the crazy people in question had dragged him into this dark passageway lit only by flickering fluorescent lights running the length of the low ceiling.

“But—” he protested now, when sure enough, his previous question had elicited nothing more than a hiss of “Shut _up_.”

She whirled on him, so suddenly that he yelped and fell back a step.

“I know this means less than nothing to you, Marcus whatever,” she said through her teeth, with a smile that didn’t touch her eyes. “But we are still dangerously close to the Cité station, and if you don’t shut up _now_ , I will leave you here.”

“It’s Marius,” he said, put out. He couldn’t help adding, “And Cité isn’t dangerous, it’s one of the safest—”

Her expression was enough to stop him in his tracks.

“Cité is very nearly directly underneath the Palace of Justice,” she whispered sharply, as if that explained everything. He was still gaping at her when she grabbed his arm and jerked him forward.

“And?” he whispered.

“And, stop asking me stupid questions,” she retorted. She moved ahead again in time to catch the drunk man as he tripped over something invisible and flung a hand out to the tunnel wall to right himself.

“Where are we now?” Marius risked asking, because his feet hurt and it felt like they’d been walking for miles underground. Her audible sigh suggested that this fell under the heading of stupid questions.

“Crossing the RER,” she told him curtly, and offered nothing else.

The white cat, which had disappeared for a while, brushed by Marius’ leg as it padded past him in the opposite direction. He looked down at it in surprise, but it was already disappearing into the gloom. He looked uncertainly at the woman, but she didn’t seem at all concerned, so he didn’t say anything and hurried after her.

A few minutes later, a squeaking sound came from the dark and Marius turned. He nearly gasped aloud as the cat’s eyes gleamed in the eerie yellow lighting.

Marius’ first thought was that it had caught a rat, but to his astonishment—he had to scrub at his eyes to make sure he wasn’t seeing things in the dark—he saw as the white cat drew closer that the rat was scurrying on alongside it as if they were the best of friends.

The rat stopped in front of Marius and looked up at him with whiskers twitching.

“Don’t!” Marius heard hissed from behind him as he bent down to it, and he looked back over one shoulder in wide-eyed surprise.

Tiny claws dug harmlessly into his skin as the rat climbed up onto his outstretched palm and made a chittering sound. Marius wasn’t sure _why_ exactly he’d decided to pick up a Parisian sewer rat, only that it had struck him as the right thing to do.

The woman had stopped, and was now staring at him. “Should I put it down?” Marius whispered, afraid even to move.

“Her,” the woman corrected at once. Something flickered across her expression, too quickly to read, and then she answered, “And no. I assumed you were going to try to scare her away.”

Marius made to straighten up, but she gestured to him impatiently and he remained in the crouch, uncomfortable though it was.

“They don’t like heights if they can help it,” the other man’s slurred voice floated back—an explanation meant, Marius assumed, for him, since the woman was apparently very familiar with what rats did and did not feel comfortable with.

At the interruption to their journey, the drunk man had promptly slumped against the wall to cough some more. Marius hadn’t realized how badly he was injured in the Metro tunnel, but the slow, wincing progress he was making now had Marius directing worried glances over at him every few minutes.

As if feeling Marius’ eyes on him now, the man looked over with a smile that was probably meant to look jovial. “I’ve had worse,” he said.

Looking at him, Marius didn’t know how that was possible.

“Thank God,” the girl was saying _to the rat_ , and it made a sound back, and the girl grimaced and looked down at her wrist, onto which were buckled four different watches. None of them was telling the correct time.

“The Market starts in an hour,” she said, sighing, “and I have some stops to make first. But I’ll be there as soon as I possibly can. Will you tell her to wait?”

The rat squeaked, and the girl seemed satisfied.

Then she proceeded to thank the rat, and ask it how her brother was, to which it must have responded positively because she smiled, and then and only then did the rat hop off Marius’ hand and scrabble back into the passageway behind them.

Marius tried and failed not to be offended that she had been politer to the rat than she had to him in all of the past forty-five minutes.

“While your chivalry is greatly appreciated, I can find my own way back,” the other man told her. It would have been more convincing if he hadn’t needed to stop in the middle of the sentence to wheeze.

“I’m not letting you die on the Intercity,” the girl said, snapping her fingers near his face so he’d open his eyes. “Do you have any idea how annoying it is to train someone new to look after my things?”

“Cheers,” the man said hoarsely, letting her slide an arm around his waist for support.

“Come on, Marcus,” the girl called over one shoulder.

“It’s Marius,” he said, somewhat sullenly.

“Whatever.”

“What stops are we making?”

“I. I am making stops. They consist of getting the two of you out of my fabulous hair, so that I can get to what I actually meant to do today. I’m dropping you both off at Bastille.”

“Why Bastille?”

“Be _cause_ Antisthenes here has a train to catch, and it’s the nearest place where the Intercity walkway comes aboveground.”

“Your cat’s gone again,” Marius told her.

“It’s not my cat. Be quiet and keep up.”

*****

When the man fell silent again, Eponine felt just the faintest twinge of guilt.

It was swallowed almost at once by annoyance—both with him and with herself. Because yes, he was talking and moving so loudly that she was pretty surprised no one unsavory had found them already. But at the same time, it was her own fault he was with them at all. She should have just left him. She knew better.

His footsteps were quieter now on the damp cement; he had listened to her, that was something at least.

“Have you seen people like us before?” she asked, turning to glance at him over one shoulder.

He looked up at her, evidently surprised to have her direct a question at him for once. “People like you?” he repeated.

“People no one else could see. People who didn’t expect to be seen.”

The boy—Marius, he had said—shook his head. “I don’t think so. How would I know?”

“They might have been minding their own business on the Metro tracks when you decided it would be a good idea to bumble in and get yourself killed.”

Even in the poor lighting, his blush was obvious. But he didn’t quail from the words like she might have expected. “I was trying to save you.”

“Well. You know what they say about good intentions.”

“So why _couldn’t_ anyone else on that platform see you?” he asked, seemingly emboldened by the fact that she hadn’t yet told him to shut up again. “And why could I?”

“As to your first question, the Marquise and I are citizens of Paris Below,” Grantaire spoke up, and then tripped. The laces of one of his black Converse had come undone.

Eponine hauled him back to his feet with an exasperated exhalation hissed through her teeth. She needed the cynic around for her own reasons, but if she didn’t…there were a hundred and one more pressing issues which needed her attention, and between the drunk and the updweller it would be a wonder if she ever managed to get around to any of them.

“Paris below what?” Marius asked, interrupting her musings.

“Below everything,” Grantaire answered. His smile was crooked. “Do you ever wonder what happens to the poor? The scum of the streets? The forgotten kids? The people with nowhere else to go?”

Marius mumbled something that sounded like “Shelters?” and Grantaire laughed, his bitterest laugh.

“Hardly. No, there’s no one in all of that posh city of yours who would make that sort of effort. We fall through the cracks,” the drunk mimed sand trickling through his fingers, “and end up here. Of course, the Marquise here was born Below.”

Eponine shot him a sharp look, and pretended she didn’t see the way Marius’ eyes widened.

“But the result is the same, either way,” Grantaire continued, undeterred. “People like you, normal people, can’t see us. We don’t belong to your world anymore, and everything in your world knows it, from teller machines to phone companies to anyone who walks by us.”

“But…what do you mean, they _can’t_ see you?”

“They could if they tried,” Grantaire amended. “They don’t. They don’t care to.”

“So why can I?”

“No idea,” Grantaire said with a shrug. “Worse luck, you.”

The other man fell silent, sensing, perhaps, that those were all the questions he was going to get answered for now.

The thing was, that last question had been bothering Eponine ever since they’d started out from Châtelet—how _could_ this man, well-off from the looks of his suit, and fairly nondescript in almost every way, have noticed them?

Especially her. Grantaire was careless, and that meant that if anyone actively tried to see him, they probably could. But not her. Never her.

She thought he was an idiot, but at the same time she couldn’t shake the niggling thought that it was a very rare type of person who would climb down onto train tracks to help people he thought were in trouble. Even rarer, someone who met a rat for the first time without shrieking or trying to throw it against a wall.

She snuck another look back at him. He was looking down at the ground as he walked, everything from the dejected slump of his shoulders to the downward turn of his mouth showing just how unhappy he was with the situation.

Still, though, he was continuing on and he wasn’t complaining. He seemed almost to have accepted that this was the state of things, and while he hoped that they would change soon, there was no point in yelling about it.

His hair, which she had thought simply brown, looked almost coppery underneath the fluorescent lighting. Her eyes followed the line of one high cheekbone, lingering on the slope of his nose, until she realized he was looking curiously back at her.

Eponine started, grimaced at him, and turned back to face the tunnel ahead.

“You like him,” Grantaire whispered so quietly only she could hear it.

“I will cut you into so many pieces they will never find all of you,” she told him sweetly.

The only sound was their footsteps on concrete as they continued on.


	3. Pigalle/Bastille

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which a princess is found by a street musician, and Grantaire is returned to his comrades -- some of whom give him a warmer welcome than others.

Cosette didn’t feel cold.

That was the first thing she was conscious of, before she felt the hard ground beneath her, or heard the dull roar of people talking, or the footfalls of a hundred Parisians hurrying past, or the echo of a violin from somewhere far off.

She had been cold, and now she wasn’t. When she at last managed to ease her eyes open, it was clear why.

She was sitting propped up against the wall of a Metro passage, in sight of the dirty stairs leading up to the street. She guessed that it must be early afternoon, from the hasty foot traffic streaming past in every direction. Details were slow to filter in—it felt as if she had been asleep for days.

Lurid colors filled her vision as she looked down at herself, and she had to blink several times to be sure that yes, she was actually covered in a patchwork of fuchsia, mustard-yellow, and pea-green. The colors, it turned out, belonged to a lumpy crocheted quilt pulled up around her chin, covering her scraped palms and ripped skirts and the blood she knew must still be on her clothing. Groggily, she began to try and free herself from the quilt.

“Oh, good,” came a bright voice from next to her, making her sit bolt upright. “You’re awake.”

Cosette turned too quickly—she had to take a moment to blink back the black spots swimming before her eyes—to look at the boy next to her.

He was slight and pixie-ish, sitting cross-legged while his slim fingers cleaned off a bright silver flute with a rag. His sandy hair was long enough to touch his freckled shoulders, and he was dressed in a truly appalling combination of a violently orange tank top and equally loud yellow plaid pants. He wore no shoes, and there was a Tam O’Shanter cap set upside-down in front of him with a few euro pieces thrown into it.

“Who are you?” she asked hoarsely, struggling to sit up. She pushed the blanket off enough so she could get a hand free to rub at her eyes. They felt sticky with the previous day’s makeup, and her eyelashes were stiff with dried tears.

“Jehan Prouvaire,” he replied with a smile so warm it was impossible not to smile back, despite the strangeness of the current circumstances. He finished with the flute and set it carefully into the battered case lying open nearby. “Street poet, part-time flautist, and current appointed guardsperson of one Lady Euphrasie Fauchelevent.”

He took her hand gracefully and pressed his lips to it. Cosette blinked at him in surprise. “You know who I am?”

“There isn’t anyone in Paris Below who doesn’t know who you are,” Jehan Prouvaire told her, and Cosette sighed at her muddled head for letting her ask such a foolish question. If he could see her to have covered her with the quilt, of course he was from Below. But at the same time… “They can see you?” she asked, nodding her head towards the passers-by who must have supplied the coins gleaming dully in the green cloth of the hat.

He smiled. “Barely.”

Cosette didn’t need to ask what he meant. Some of the citizens Below still existed on the fringes of Paris Above, able to get a few coins or a cup of coffee for busking or begging.

“Thank you for the blanket,” Cosette said, remembering her manners. “Did I…how did you find me?”

“You fell into my lap,” Jehan replied cheerily. “Out of the wall.” He gestured to the tiled wall of the Metro behind them. “I thought you were injured, but…” he trailed off, raising suddenly worried clear blue eyes to hers.

“It wasn’t my blood,” she confirmed. Grief, which had been banished in the confusion, returned like a lead weight in her chest. She had forgotten, for a few moments, what had happened. The blood, and her family, and the knife in the dark. The man who very nearly wasn’t a man at all.

She sat up straighter and looked around sharply, automatically.

She half-expected to see the man with the wolf’s smile pushing through the crowd to get to her even now, in full daylight.

“I don’t know who you were running from, but I don’t think they’ve followed you,” Jehan said. His tone was light, but she could hear the concern in it.

It wasn’t until his warm hand wrapped around hers again, unbidden, that she realized she was trembling. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do now, where she was supposed to go when even the place she felt safest had been infiltrated in the most violent, vicious way possible.

Unbidden, a memory from only a few weeks ago swam to the surface of her mind: her mother taking her hands with a terrible urgency in her brown eyes and telling her daughter, _If something happens, Cosette, if something happens to me—_

_But why would something happen?_ she had asked.

_It’s not important, darling_ , her mother had told her, smoothing blonde hair off Cosette’s forehead. _But if it does, you must find the Marquise de Carabas_.

_Who?_

_You don’t know her, but she will know you. If something happens, she may be the only person Below who can help you_.

Her mother had known, Cosette realized numbly. Her mother had known that something dark was after them, something with pointed teeth and a knife that glittered in the dark.

“I have to go,” she said now, folding up the hideous quilt and handing it over. “Thank you so much for your help, I promise you will be repaid for it.”

He opened his mouth, but she was already standing. She almost fell again—her legs were weak, unsteady under her slight weight. But Jehan was already on his feet, supporting her with an arm around her waist. His touch was respectful, clearly ready to pull away if she indicated that he ought to, and so she didn’t flinch away. Besides, she really did need the help.

“I need to find the Marquise de Carabas,” Cosette told him.

“Easy, there,” he said, tipping the euros from the hat to his hand and tugging the ridiculous thing onto his head, pom pom and all. He tucked the quilt under one arm, pocketed the coins, and extended an elbow for her to link her own arm through. “Why do you think I’m packing up?” he asked brightly. “I’m to take you to the market.”

*****

It was a half-hour later by the time the three travelers emerged from what should have been an electrical closet into the milling crowd at Bastille station, and Marius found he was horribly jostled even worse than usual. A woman stepped on his foot with a viciously pointed heel, and then a man hurrying past knocked his briefcase into Marius’ ribs so hard the young man made an _oof_ sound of surprise. He was still rubbing his side and frowning after the businessman when a train pulled into the station.

He looked expectantly over at his two companions, but the man had sat down heavily on the ground to attempt to retie his shoe (with little success) and the woman was checking one of her many watches and frowning. Neither of them paid the arriving train any attention.

“I thought he was getting on?” Marius ventured tentatively.

“Not this train,” said the scruffy man, who he’d heard her call Grantaire (which seemed an odd sort of name, really, though Marius wasn’t impolite enough to say so out loud). He said it as if this explained absolutely everything, but Marius felt even more in the dark than ever.

Everyone around them packed onto the train like sardines and it pulled out, leaving the three of them standing on the platform alone.

“You can go, by the way,” the woman told him dismissively as she put her hands in her dress pockets and rocked back on her heels, looking down the tunnel.

Marius stared at her until she looked back at him, eyebrows raised in a very clear _what?_

“But I—what am I supposed to do now?”

She held up a finger, frowned, and then said thoughtfully, “I’ve just double-checked with myself, and it turns out no, I _actually_ couldn’t care less.” She waved an impatient hand at him. “Go to work, go drinking, throw yourself in front of another train, it’s all the same to me.”

“But—” Marius tried again. He wasn’t sure _why_ exactly he was delaying, when from the first minute he’d been jerked backwards into a tunnel beneath the Metro all he’d wanted was for things to go back to normal. All he knew was that now he was free to go, and something inexplicable was keeping him standing here.

 “Excellent, here we are,” the girl interrupted his musings, as a new train (absolutely identical to the last, except the windows were blacked out) pulled into the station with a squealing of brakes. Curiously, the scrolling digital sign above his head didn’t announce the train’s arrival.

Marius wanted very badly to ask why this train was different from the other one, but suspected that would only be answered with a biting retort. He glanced around instead.

In the gap between trains, more people had arrived and were waiting, leaning against the wall or sitting on the plastic benches running the length of the station. Not one of them looked up at the new four-car train as its doors slid open, and Marius couldn’t help but sigh in resignation to more inexplicable things happening.

“Thank goodness,” came a new voice, heavy with relief, and Marius looked up in surprise. A plainly-dressed man with a shaved-smooth head and kind brown eyes had emerged from the train, and was very clearly addressing the two people whom no one else in the Metro could see. The man’s expression of relief changed quickly to horror as he took in the other man’s battered appearance. “Christ, Grantaire, what _happened_?” he asked, hurrying forward to take the drunk’s weight from the girl. “Come on, I’ve got you.”

“Was trying to save a small child from a gang of bikers,” Grantaire told him. “There were at _least_ twenty-five of them. Big.” He mimed height with his hands.

“Twenty-five, huh?” the bald man asked, clearly trying not to smile despite the worry still written across his face.

Grantaire dissolved into wheezing laughter. Marius almost didn’t hear it because he was too busy staring past the bald man at the little bit of the Metro car he could see. There were no plastic seats, no upright poles—and was that _carpet_?

The other man glanced at the girl, eyebrows lifting. “Surprised to see you here, Marquise.”

One corner of her red mouth quirked up. “Don’t worry. I’m not staying long.”

“Thank you for bringing him back.”

“It wasn’t out of the goodness of my heart, trust me.”

“I know that,” he said simply. “But you still did it.”

A different man appeared in the open doors. He was taller, in jeans and a button-down with the sleeves rolled up to reveal uneven bands of black ink.

He pushed round-framed glasses up on his nose and said calmly, “It has been requested that everyone who is getting on the car get on the car, and everyone who is not does not, so that we can leave in a timely fashion.”

“Requested,” Marius heard Grantaire giggle under his breath, although he didn’t really see what was funny about it.

“A timely fashion?” the girl repeated sardonically. “For Christ’s sake. You’re not even on a schedule.”

The bald man just shook his head and helped Grantaire onto the train, with a hissed curse as he stumbled on the threshold.

“You coming, de Carabas?” the man in the button-down asked, raising one eyebrow.

“Is it your goal in life to see me thrown off a moving Metro car?” she answered.

Marius started and stared at her.

The other man shrugged. “It’s been a dull week.”

She tipped her head to one side, evidently considering. “Are you going by the Hotel de Ville?”

“About sixty times a day.”

“Then what the hell. I need my jacket back, anyway.” The girl who had been called a Marquise stepped onto the train without so much as a backwards glance at Marius, who was still standing agape. The blaring sound of doors closing sounded throughout the station, and still no one looked up.

“You can come with us, if you like,” said the man still standing in the open doors, and Marius started in surprise. He’d assumed the man had retreated into the car. He adjusted his glasses again, regarding Marius with evident thought before adding, “But you should keep in mind that our world is much harder to get out of than in.”

Marius glanced around at the platform full of people talking on their cell phones and examining their fingernails and reading the newspaper, while a functioning Metro car full of people was right in front of them. He wanted nothing more to do with this strange world he’d stumbled into, obviously. But at the same time…

_I can always just get off at the next stop,_ he told himself. And hurried forward onto the train just as the doors whooshed closed behind him.

******

“Oh good,” a lofty voice came from the far end of the car they were in, as the train began to move forward. “You brought him back.”

“He’s hurt, Enjolras,” Eponine heard Bossuet say quietly as he helped Grantaire to a nearby sofa. The train had been stripped of all its normal attributes and now resembled nothing as much as a dormitory common room, with a large table piled with papers and maps and charts taking up most of the room and scattered, mismatched chairs pushed around it.

“What?” Enjolras asked, looking up from a spread-out chart, blue eyes narrowing. Then he seemed to actually _see_ Grantaire and he didn’t need to ask what anymore, because it was quite obvious that Grantaire was, in fact, injured. The blond man went very still for a moment, and then his expression grew hard again. “What did he do this time?”

“What did I do?” Grantaire asked, not resisting as a different man, this one with unruly dark hair and a perpetually surprised look on his face, stripped off his jacket and shirt to better examine the injuries. “Alas, I seem to have run headlong into a hapless bystander’s fist several dozen times. And then I believe his compatriot was unlucky enough to injure his foot on my ribs. I am _so_ careless.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Enjolras, darling, have you ever considered private investigations? You would be so awfully good at it. You are attuned to every single detail, no matter how remote.”

Enjolras moved around the table, and the others—there were six or seven other young men in the car—cleared a path for him as if he were royalty. He stopped at the couch and looked down at the drunk, his mouth set in a thin line.

An outside party who didn’t know any better might mistake it for a sign of worry.

“What did you do?” Enjolras asked again, quietly, in a voice which held none of its previous accusation. His eyes moved over the bruises already plain on Grantaire’s face and naked torso, the mottled blue and black and yellow spreading over his side, and the blood caked onto his face.

“As usual, my very existence is enough to inspire animosity.” Grantaire managed to pry one eye open to look up at Enjolras. His hand twitched as if involuntarily, but remained palm-down on the couch.

He wasn’t so drunk that he would try to touch Enjolras without his permission.

Enjolras, however, had leaned over to push Grantaire’s hair out of his eyes, peering with a professional sort of detachment at the ugly cut on one cheekbone, beneath his swollen-shut black eye.

Grantaire went very still as Enjolras’ fingers traced ever so slightly over the bruises. “Do you know who it was?” Enjolras asked, bending still closer in his inspection, and Grantaire swallowed painfully and shook his head slowly from one side to the other. He seemed unable to drag his eyes away from Enjolras’ face, close as it was.

“Are they together?” the freckly young man called Marius whispered to Eponine. It was quiet, but not quiet enough.

Enjolras’ head snapped up and Marius visibly quailed from the fierce look in those blazing blue eyes. “ _What_ did you say?”

Enjolras _had_ been talking about three inches from Grantaire’s mouth, and Grantaire was still staring up at him like a drowning man, so really, it wasn’t all that unreasonable that someone who didn’t know them could mistake the situation. It didn’t stop Eponine from chuckling vindictively.

“I didn’t—” Marius squeaked.

“Combeferre,” Enjolras said, ignoring him and straightening up. His eyes had just fallen upon Eponine. “Who allowed the Marquise de Carabas onto this train?”

“You said that everyone who wanted should get on,” Combeferre told him with a small shrug.

“Everyone who is _not_ a soulless mercenary with no loyalties to speak of who would sell her own friends, if she had them, up the river for the right price and only ever looks out for herself.”

“I apologize,” Combeferre said. “You should have clarified.”

“Where’s your spy?” the blonde man asked, addressing Eponine herself this time. He looked around with a grimace. Marius looked bewildered, but Eponine laughed. “Suspicious, much? Sometimes a cat is just a cat, Enjolras.”

“With you, nothing is just anything. Why are you here?”

“You _are_ charming today. I found your cynic half bleeding to death in an alley.” She didn’t miss the flicker in his expression at those words. “You’re welcome.”

“And now you expect a favor in return, I suppose?” Enjolras asked evenly.

“You wound me,” Eponine said, putting a hand to her heart. The blond man snorted.

“Speaking of wounded,” Bossuet interrupted, eyes on Joly, who was now kneeling by the couch rummaging through a black doctor’s bag he seemed to have produced from nowhere. “How is he?”

“He’ll be okay,” Joly said, and he sounded sure. “Two cracked ribs, but there’s no internal bleeding.”

“Look at that. Am I a pro or what,” Grantaire wheezed, letting his eyes fall shut. Flippant commentary aside, he looked exhausted.

A muscle worked in Enjolras’ jaw. “Do you know who did this to him?” he directed at Eponine without looking at her.

She shook her head. “Found him like this. He’s not the only one from Below to get caught out Above, in the past couple weeks, though.”

“Figures. The city is rotting at the core,” Enjolras muttered.

“Which?” Eponine asked, with a smirk. “Above or Below?”

Enjolras didn’t get a chance to answer. “Hotel de Ville,” a redheaded man called as he walked nimbly across a cluster of chairs to get to where they were assembled. The train had begun to slow down.  
“Bahorel’s getting off with you,” Bossuet told Eponine as a big man with wild hair who gave the impression of being about seven feet tall and was, as usual, not wearing anything but black jeans and a fierce white grin, stood up and stretched. The visible expanse of skin on his arms, neck, and torso (which was considerable) was more tattooed than not. “Oh, and keep an eye out for Huntress, will you?”

“She’s in my appointment book,” Eponine told him.

“Any chance you’d deliver a message?”

“Do I look like a carrier pigeon?”

His face fell, and she sighed deeply and held out a hand. Bossuet beamed and dug a folded piece of paper out of his back pocket. “I was going to send it with Bahorel, but it’s probably better that you take it.”

“Are you calling me irresponsible?” Bahorel asked, appearing at Eponine’s shoulder as she took the note and tucked it into a hidden pocket on her sequined dress.  
“Can you promise me you _won’t_ lose your pants and the note with them?” was Bossuet’s dry reply.

“Touché,” Bahorel said, and grinned unapologetically.

The Marquise picked up her jacket from where Joly had folded it on the arm of the couch and shrugged it on, pulling her hair out from underneath the collar and smoothing down the familiar velvet. There now, that felt much better.

“Antisthenes,” she said, and Grantaire cracked one eye open to look at her. “Thanks for not getting blood on my jacket.”

The car shuddered to a halt. None of them was holding onto anything but no one stumbled—all of them, including Marius, were lifelong Metro riders and knew how to keep their feet underneath them.

The Marquise de Carabas took off her hat and offered a sweeping (and decidedly mocking) bow to the car, then turned on one heel and strode out of the car.

*****

“Wait!” Marius said, grabbing for the Marquise’s arm. She made an irritated sound. “If you wanted a kiss goodbye, all you had to do was ask,” she said, rolling her eyes, and Marius, flustered beyond all normal standards of the word, could only stand there in shock as the girl he’d only just met leaned in to press her lips to his cheek.

Only for a split second, and then he realized she was saying something in his ear, so quietly that no one else in the car would’ve possibly been able to hear.

“Watch yourself around these ones, Marcus,” she was whispering, breath warm on his skin. She smelled like lipstick and perfume and dead flowers. “Angel’s blood makes you beautiful, but it can make you just as terrible.”

With that, she pulled away from him, tapped the brim of her hat, and disappeared into the melee of people with the man called Bahorel close behind her.

Marius, to whom nothing had been explained _at all_ , gaped after her, completely nonplussed.

“She does that,” Bossuet said sympathetically, and patted Marius’ arm. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“A word of warning,” the man named Enjolras said from behind him, before Bossuet could go on. Marius turned. The blond man shook his head. “The only thing you can ever count on with the Marquise de Carabas is that she cares about herself more than you.”


End file.
